Oyster Creek meeting geared to industry insiders

Patricia A. Miller

Ocean View White finding. Resource loading. Cross-cutting. Action matrix. Degraded cornerstone. Welcome to the mind-numbing world of nuclear plant corporate-speak.

That's what audience members heard when they attended the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC) May 23 hearing on how the Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station in Lacey performed in 2006. They heard it over and over again.

"They were talking to each other as insiders," said Blanche Krubner, of Jackson, the president of the Ocean County League of Women Voters during a break in the hearing. "They didn't explain it to the public. Too many acronyms. We are not all insiders. They were talking code."

Representatives of AmerGen, the subsidiary of Exelon Corp., the plant's owners, sat on the left side of the meeting room. NRC officials, including Samuel J. Collins, the NRC's Region 1 administrator, sat on the right.

The hearing began with each side reading pre-scripted speeches.

AmerGen representatives sung the praises of how much money Exelon has spent on the plant and how safe things are these days.

NRC officials then seemed to lob questions back to AmerGen that gave company officials more of a chance to talk about what a swell job they are doing.

Janet Tauro, a founding member of the citizens group Grandmothers, Mothers and More for Energy Safety, compared the meeting to a Kabuki play.

NRC officials offered "set-up" questions to Oyster Creek representatives, Tauro said.

"It's like setting them up so they could answer so positively about the great things they are doing," she said.

There was a lot of discussion about an Aug. 6, 2005, "white finding" at the plant, but no explanation about exactly what happened.

For the uninitiated, meaning most of us, the NRC ranks mishaps at nuclear plants on a color scale. Green is the best, red is the worst. A white finding is characterized as an issue with "low to moderate" safety problems that may require further inspection.

Oyster Creek's white finding was in the emergency preparedness "cornerstone" of the NRC's reactor oversight process. This is not comforting news for people who live within a 10-mile radius of the plant on Route 9 south, or anyone in New Jersey, for that matter.

This is what happened.

While Ocean County slept during the early morning hours of Aug. 6, 2005, plant operators failed to take the appropriate emergency-response action when a large amount of sea grass clogged the north side intake structure screens, which resulted in a decrease in the intake structure water level. The intake water level decreased for roughly 60 minutes, which met the NRC's values for an unusual event and alert declarations. But plant operators did not declare an event and did not activate their emergency response to help mitigate the event, according to the NRC.

"The potential consequences were that the failure to declare an alert prevented the activation of both on-site and off-site emergency responders during an actual event," the NRC said. "Had the event degraded further, the on-site responders would not have been readily available to assist in the mitigation of the event."

Oyster Creek flunked a subsequent NRC inspection of its own corrective action plan conducted from May 15 to June 12, 2006. The NRC has scheduled yet another inspection for the same problems for the first week in June.

There was no mention at the meeting of a Feb. 13, 2006, screw-up, when a hydrogen denotation occurred in the plant's off-gas system. AmerGen initially said the problem was an equipment-related mishap, not operator error.

But the NRC found that Oyster Creek control room personnel had received and reset the high hydrogen alarm SEVEN times during a two-hour period before the detonation, yet failed to comply with an alarm response procedure to determine the underlying cause.

"Based on operator interviews and two actual events since August 2005, it is apparent that while corrective actions have been taken to strengthen crew procedural response, knowledge deficiencies and inconsistencies continue to exist regarding procedural use and adherence by licensed operators," the NRC said.

There is no place for operator error in the oldest nuclear plant in the country. Let's hope Oyster Creek manages to get it right on the latest inspection.

Most of the citizens who attended the hearing had more than passing knowledge of the problems with the oldest nuclear plant in the United States. That's because they are members of various citizen activist and environmental groups that oppose Oyster Creek's relicensing for another 20 years.

Unfortunately, there were few just plain residents at the hearing. More than half a million people now call Ocean County home. It's unfathomable that so few seem to realize or care that the 38-year-old plant could get another 20 years of life very soon.

Maybe Richard Webster had it right.

Webster, a staff attorney for the Rutgers Environmental Law Clinic, said after the meeting that residents don't really want to hear about the plant.

"In some ways, if you live close to something potentially dangerous, you'd rather not think about it," Webster said.

Patricia A. Miller is a managing editor with Greater Media Newspapers.